


Some sunny day

by kenwayallgetalong



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Backstory, Drinking, F/M, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Racism, Post-World War II, Smoking, implied PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:35:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22674196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenwayallgetalong/pseuds/kenwayallgetalong
Summary: The Howling Commandos, after the war.
Relationships: Howling Commandos & Original Female Character(s), James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers (implied)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 51





	Some sunny day

Of all the blasted, stupid things, he wanted to go into _politics_. The Army was just a stop along the way, get some service under his belt so he’d understand the boys fighting for their country, then come home and stand for Parliament. 

Father had expected it of him, so of course he did, but the thought of it kept him going. He’d turn it over and over in his head, the thought of serving his country with his words and wit, through Eton, through Cambridge, through Sandhurst, then France, Africa, then finally in Italy, crammed in a cell with a bunch of other soldiers. 

And then some mad bastard with his country’s colours splashed across his chest burst into the camp, declaring himself _Captain America_ , and who the hell is he to not believe him?

He dimly wonders if this is what Father would have expected from him going off to war, but finds he can’t quite summon up the will to care, and charges into battle alongside men he never would have considered fighting alongside in his life, the Americans and Frenchie, but men he now considers his brothers. 

As they sit around a campfire somewhere in the Ardennes and Bucky and Dum Dum wrestle for the others’ smoke ration, while Morita watches with a grin as he fiddles with the radio trying to get the BBC (bless his bloody soul), Dernier rolls his eyes at them scrumming on the forest floor, and Jones chuckles as Monty passes him a lighter for his smoke (because they weren’t _fools_ and didn’t gamble away their rations). And Cap eventually pulls them apart and laughs as Bucky growls good-naturedly that now Steve is saving _him_ from fights and no matter how many miles he goes he still can’t get used to that, and the old lines he studied back in a classroom in Eton float to the forefront of his mind;

_“We happy few, we band of brothers.”_

And Monty smiles, despite the war and the death and how many bullets they’ve spent, because he has found his brothers.

And after the war ends, and they drink a dismal toast in a raucous pub in London, Monty sits at the bar nursing a whiskey, and wonders about Cap and Sarge, and if they’re happy where they are. 

And for some reason the thought of going into politics, sending more young men out into the fields to die makes him sick, and he ducks into the alley to retch up the whiskey he’d been drowning his sorrows in when Jones finds him.

“Too much to drink, Monty?” He asks cautiously, leaning against the stained brickwork of the pub.

“Something like that.” He grimaces, wiping his mouth with his sleeve and taking a sip of the glass of water Jones offers. “I want to become a teacher.” He blurts all of a sudden, feeling awful for betraying what Father wanted, and ludicrously free for admitting it out loud for the first time. Jones barely reacts, just raising an eyebrow and crossing his arms.

“I’d offer to write you a reference, but I think you’ll do fine without it.” He drawls, and Monty just laughs bitterly, pulls Gabe into a hug, and they head back into the bar to rejoin the others.

As it turns out, being the only British member of the Howling Commandos (what a ludicrous name, _honestly_ , SSR Strike Unit 1 was just fine) was all the reference he needed, and Cambridge accepted him as a professor. 

He remembered the books Barnes would devour on R&R and in downtime, on planes and in backs of trucks, and became an English professor, trying to help people escape the world they found themselves in by immersing themselves in others. 

In the meantime, he drinks and smokes and gambles away most of his money and doesn’t care. He gets divorced three times and has two children to speak of, and still lives in the ancestral Falsworth home with his sister and _lives_ , just like he promised himself he would. The Howlies give precisely one interview after the war, and refuse to go into detail about Cap and Sarge to any media for years. They make sure they’re remembered as heroes and that’s enough, and the rest they keep for Barnes’ family, who all insist they’ve all got permanent places at their table for Thanksgiving, and he sends them a card every Christmas. He’s a little more lenient with his students, but only rarely.

One day, decades after the war, while America’s dragged itself into another one and Monty’s more than content to sit it out and teach, they’re reading the Illiad. Turns out studying Classics had been some use, after all (ancient Greek and Latin came in middling helpful back in Greece and Italy, as well as one notable moment in Paris), so he may as well keep it going. As they’re muddling through the translations, one of his students pipes up from the back.

“Professor Falsworth?” He asks, his expression timid behind his glasses. 

“Jamie?” He grins back at him. He was a good student, one of his favourites. Jamie smiles and ducks his head and pushes his long hair (far too long, was this the fashion these days?) off his forehead and mumbles out a question.

“I, uh, was reading about Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship, and, er, is there a, perhaps, deeper connection, between the two, than the text may suggest?”

It takes Monty a moment to parse out Jamie’s meaning between his stammering and obfuscation, when he realises. 

And he notices the pleading light in Jamie’s eyes up the back of the classroom, begging him not to expose him in his answer. 

How he buried his meaning behind stammers and pauses, and how despite Jamie being a strapping young lad, none of the women in the class seem to interest him, and how he gazed at Thomas, Monty’s nephew who’d dropped by for lunch one day, and Jamie had dawdled in the corridor after class as Thomas strolled over to his uncle Monty.

And he remembers seeing a similar light in Barnes’ eyes as he stared at Rogers, and hearing Rogers’ sobs through the thin walls in the weeks after the Alps, like a man who’d forgotten how to breathe, the grief was so strong. 

Monty takes a shaky breath as he remembers them, the brothers he lost, and has kept buried deep down to avoid going mad with grief, and realises just how happy they were, and how happy they could have been.

“You know, Jamie, I think there very well may be.” He hears himself saying, and smiles through the tears threatening to burst through him. Jamie lights up like Monty’s handed him a piece of the moon, and if the rest of the class understands, they don’t show it (they’re Brits, after all, they’re a buttoned up folk, Dernier gleefully reminds him whenever they meet), but Monty feels oddly weightless having let them see that tiny snippet of before. “Now, come along.” He adds, and raps sharply on the desk to bring the class’ attention back to the board, and the lesson continues. 

Time goes on, and Monty sticks to his vices and his bachelor lifestyle until he dies, and despite questions and constant probing, visits from biographers and filmmakers, he carries Cap and Sarge’s secrets with him until the day he dies, because they deserve some peace, damnit. 

It’s the least he can give them.

-

Marseille just wasn’t the same.

Dernier had stayed in Paris, after the rest of the Howlies had gone home, and wept to see the _tricolore_ flying above every building again. But he knew Marseille was calling him, the sea was calling him, and he went back home. 

And it wasn’t the same. The streets he’d run down as a boy, the bars he’d drunk in with his friends after a long shift at the docks, even the shoreline he’d loved was different. All bearing the scars the Nazis had left. So he helped rebuild, married a local girl, Agathé, and they tried to move on. He visited _papa’s_ grave, and paid his respects, and tried, he tried so, so hard to live like they all promised they would. Monty to England and his sister, Jim back to California and his family, Jones to Howard and his classes, Dum Dum to his wife and son back in Boston, and Barnes and Rogers to their tiny apartment in Brooklyn. He felt he could draw all of their homes in his sleep now, how much they’d all talked about them round campfires and in bars, clinging onto the promise of home and hope. 

But he hated them for it too. Because Marseille was waiting for him, and unlike their cities, their homes, Marseille had suffered dearly in the war. Their precious homes were untouched, but every road he walked down, he could hear the crunch of the boots as the Nazis stormed into his home, he could hear his first wife screaming as they dragged her from their house, hear his children crying as soldiers tore them away from their mother, hear his _maman_ sobbing as they smashed the windows of her home, and the rush of the flame as they lit it.

It wasn’t the city he’d been waiting years to come back to. It wasn’t his home anymore. 

Home for years had been basements, attics, campfires in forests, and barracks filled with Jones’ snores. He chuckles weakly over a glass of wine, sitting up by the fire one night after Agathé has gone to bed, remembering what Rogers had muttered one night in Greece, _“Home is where the heart is.”_

“And where is my heart, _mon ami_?” He asks the flames, and stares into the fire long after it’s burnt down to nothing. A year passes, then two. He works at the inn Agathé’s parents owned and they have a son, and his family is the one spark of joy in the scorched earth of his heart. And he still feels so hollow, despite it all. 

Pierre is just a few months shy of turning three when he gets a letter from Stark, inviting him to an event in New York for the five year anniversary. He stares at it, and Agathé gently pushes him to go, because she loves Marseille too, but understands the hurt in his eyes. He refuses, and has made up his mind to write Stark back with a polite but firm ‘no’, when he gets a telegram from Monty saying _“Sailing out a week tomorrow. Need a co-captain.”_ , in that blunt British way he’d always had, and the hard shell he’s built around his heart to stop from breaking cracks a little, and he cries softly into Agathé’s blouse as she holds him close.

They sail over to New York, and after a few drinks, the awkwardness has faded and they’re all howling with laughter once again. They all cry too, just a little bit, privately, of course, Jim excusing himself for an overly long smoke, Dum Dum spending a moment longer than he needs to in the bathroom, but it’s the first time they’ve all been together since before, and damnit they’re allowed to. 

Stark had got them a private table in the bar, with one of his grim-faced men there guarding them from any eager fans, but the New York instinct to act unimpressed by anything out of the ordinary is strong and they enjoy a deliciously unbothered evening. At one point, Dernier’s at the bar, trying to discern the right bottle of wine through the fog of alcohol when an unfamiliar man sidles up to him. 

“‘Scuse me pal, are you Jacques Dernier?” He asks, pronouncing it correctly, and in Dernier’s book that’s good enough for him to merit a greeting, so he waves off Stark’s security and chats with the man (John, his name is). He asks a perfunctory question or two about the war, and then admits he had something else to ask. 

Dernier raises an eyebrow and sips his wine, letting the man speak. “I’ve got a small film operation goin’ on out west with a couple of fellas and we’re lookin’ for a man who’s got experience with explosives, ‘cept none of our boys known ‘em quite like you do. You think you could help us out?”

And it’s wonderful. _Oh_ , but it’s wonderful. The traps he’d laid and fuses he’d lit against HYDRA can now entertain and provide some measure of joy to the world, instead of destruction. He spends two weeks ‘out west’ as John calls it, (John _Wayne_ , as Stark informs him over breakfast the next day), and after impressing them all with his expertise and knowledge, he gets offered a job on the spot. He rushes back across the ocean, and Agathé, by some wonderful chance, falls in love with the idea, and they leave Marseille and France behind them for America, and arrive with Pierre in Hollywood and he _loves_ it. 

He feels awful, leaving France behind, but there’s nothing in Marseille left for him but painful memories of what he’s lost and out here everything is new and ripe for an expert’s taking. Within a year, he’s made enough of a name for himself that he can set up his own company, and happily cuts ties with John after he makes an awful remark about Jim and Gabe at a party and Jim punches him out (he spills a drink on Cary Grant in doing so, but he’s surprisingly nice about it and refuses to let them pay for the drycleaning). 

As Hollywood thrives, so does Dernier’s company, and the demand for pyrotechnics and stuntmen is through the roof. He has three more children, and works hard, and gleefully yells “Boom!”, when a scene works just right, and Agathé smiles as she runs the company while Jacques plays with explosives all day.

Soon enough, any Hollywood picture worth a damn has a Dernier in it, and the family becomes legend. 

There is one unbreakable rule that everyone in Hollywood soon learns to follow; nothing about Captain America, or the Howling Commandos. Jacques doesn’t delude himself, he knows they’ll still be made and get everything wrong, or relegate the men that aren’t white, red-blooded American men to the background, or worse, but out of principle he refuses every job that so much as mentions them, because he won’t do that to the memory of the Howling Commandos. 

They’ve all earned themselves that much. 

A thousand lucrative offers pass him by, but he happily refuses them, and his children know to do the same. Many take his silence for apathy, or hate, but those that know the Derniers know better understand. He passes away in the early 90s, and he thinks of the life he’s lead and smiles.

Nearly twenty years later, Steve Rogers walks into Dernier Productions, and Pierre Dernier passes out. Two years later, the first ever Dernier Productions film featuring the Howling Commados is released. 

Some call them sellouts. Others know better. 

-

_“Victory abroad, victory at home.”_

That’s what they’d said, what his parents’ letters had always mentioned. Win the war in Europe, and maybe, just maybe they’ll make some headway in the one back home. The one Gabe Jones had been fighting from the moment he was born, in a country that hated him for the colour of his skin. 

Everyone knew Cap had been a shield for everyone, but Gabe felt his loss so strongly. And so many other soldiers came up to him and said the same thing, how they’d felt proud to fight when they saw Gabe charging into battle alongside them, how Cap, in no uncertain terms, had always fought for Gabe to be accepted alongside the rest of the Howlies.

“You’re an inspiration, son.”, so many men told him, and he gnashed his teeth inwardly while he smiled blithely on the outside, because he didn’t _ask_ to be a hero, he didn’t _ask_ to be put on a pedestal. He wanted to go back to Howard, and ask that girl from his class out for a drink, he wanted to go back to his parent’s house and sit up with his pops talking about their own respective wars, he wanted to hold his momma close. But suddenly, he was every negro soldier in Europe, and represented all of them. 

He said as much to his pops, when he was back home, and they were sitting out on the porch, listening to the crickets. “I’m not Cap.” He muttered, as he stubbed out his smoke and leaned back in his chair. 

He knew the citations Cap had drawn up for him and Jim, over so many battles, had been refused, and the rest of the Commandos had instantly withdrawn their own citations, because they were a _team_ , damnit. 

He knew when he’d been laid up in a field hospital after that mess in Paris, and some lieutenant with a far too shiny set of bars on his collar had come in, talking about ‘making arrangements’ to ship Gabe back stateside, even though the bullet through his calf wasn’t enough to keep him out of the war for long enough before a new mission for them to come in, he’d be right as rain by then, and he’d be _damned_ if he was kicked out of the Commandos like this, but the lieutenant didn’t _listen_ , and it was only when Cap stopped by with a fresh ration of smokes for Gabe and had twigged what was going on that he got that look in his eyes, and roared the lieutenant down right then and there. 

He knew when some slimy reporter looking for a tidbit of gossip amongst the Allies’ elite squad had pushed Barnes about the ‘un-American’ members of the Howlies, and even though Barnes was half-dead after a two-week mission through the Alps, he’d led the man in circles looking for his scoop, before getting that look in his eyes, and the reporter had scampered away, tail between his legs.

He knew Cap and Sarge and the rest of the Howlies had had his back through and through, and he’d had theirs _(“All for one and one for all!”_ Monty had crowed once in a pub in London on leave),through a hundred different battles. He was just so tired of it all. 

His pops had sat back in his own chair, reaching for a match and lighting his pipe. He took a deep draught and clenched his jaw, looking out over the garden. “Course you aren’t Cap.” He says, keeping his eyes out on the garden as Gabe looks over at him. “You knew him proper though, and that’s what matters.”

God, yes, Gabe knows. He’d barely been back in Georgia an hour when a kid he’d never met ran up to him in the streets and asked “Is it true you knew Captain America? Is it true he could lift a tank with one hand?”. Everyone knew the Cap from the newsreels and the comics, the legend who charged against Nazis with American righteousness in his heart and fire in his eyes.

No one else, except the Howlies and maybe Peggy, knew the Cap that woke up screaming night after night after the Alps. No one else knew the Cap who had wept silently over the condolence letters he’d had to write to Barnes’ family back home. 

“Don’t let them take who he was from you. They can take everything else from you, but not what you got in here.” Gabe’s pops had tapped a withered hand against his temple at that, finally looking over at him. “Who’s that writer you like so much? That Woolf lady?”

“Virginia Woolf?” Gabe replied, confused. His pops turned sheepish for a moment. 

“I read a few of your books while you were away.” He grinned. “Had to do something.” 

Gabe smiles, despite himself, and looks up at the stars. “‘Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.’” He quotes, remembering his classes at Howard. Gabe’s pops chuckles. 

“They can say what they want about him, but you knew him. Don’t let them rewrite it, and don’t let them forget it.”

“Do you miss it?” Gabe blurts, before he can stop himself. “War, I mean.” He’d been born while his pops was still away, fighting the war in France. Part of the ‘hellfighters’, as Dernier had proudly told him one day. 

“Sometimes.” He admits, setting his pipe down on the table between them. “It’s simpler out there. Don’t die.” They both chuckled bitterly at that. “Back here…” He added, his voice soft. “Lot more rules in this fight.” Gabe nods in silent agreement, ‘cause he knows he knows. The politics, the promises, it’s all so much more complicated than war. A small part of him misses when his world was just the Commandos, bouncing from mission to mission on Agent Carter’s orders. Now it’s all become so much bigger than he ever imagined. 

That night, he dreams of the war again. When they were _finally_ pulled out of the Ardennes, and they drowsed their way off the line in a truck. Gabe had been smoking quietly in the back, trying to burn some of what he’d seen from his mind, when he heard Cap and Sarge arguing in hushed tones up front. 

“That’s a shield too, Buck.” He’d said, pointing at the rifle Barnes had propped between his knees. Cause Cap’s shiny frisbee was one thing, but Barnes’ bullets were another. 

A few weeks later he gets a call from Carter and Dum Dum; they’re in town as they cross the country trying to get some people together for the new intelligence agency they’ve both hitched their wagons to. 

“What _could_ convince you pal, come on?” Dugan chuckles over a beer in their hotel bar. “I’ve sworn off the whole marriage thing, but if it means you’ll join us I’ll get down on one knee right here right now.”

Gabe snorts into his beer, laughing harder than he has in weeks, but he knows his answer already. “I’m sorry pal. If you need a translator drop me a line, but full-time intelligence work ain’t my game.”

“Leave him alone, Timothy,” Agent Carter scolds from across the table, her lips still twisted in a wry smile. “Private Jones has bigger fish to fry.” 

Gabe smiles and raises his glass in a salute to her, as she does the same. Dugan just shakes his head and takes a long draught of beer. “F.I.E.L.D’s gonna be worse off without ya, pal, tell you that one for free.”

“F.I.E.L.D?” Gabe asks, as Carter frowns across from him. 

“Fascistic Intelligence Exposure Liaisons Division.” She enunciates primly, before making a face. “Rather sounds like we’re the ones we’re trying to stop, but Thompson quite liked the name, and anything pro-America gives the Senate a warm glow so we’re trying to appease them while we can. If you’ve got a better name, I’m all ears.” And Cap’s words come back to Gabe’s ears again, back in the truck bouncing through a Belgian forest.

_“That’s a shield too, Buck.”_

“Yeah.” Gabe says, a smile spreading slowly across his face. “I think I got something.”

-

Jim gets used to it after a while. Hell, he’d been used to it even before Pearl Harbour; the harsh eyes that watched him as he walked, spitting at him in the street, calling him ‘Jap’ and ‘Nip’, telling him to go back to where he was born, forgetting he was _born_ in California, he’d fought a goddamn war for these people alongside their greatest symbol. 

Fuck, he missed Cap. And Barnes. The newsreels and the papers had liked Cap more, but damnit if Barnes hadn’t had his back through a thousand firefights just as often as Cap had. How Cap had smarted and raged and roared at the officers who refused to acknowledge Jim as a Howling Commando, and how Barnes said little but watched with a steely glint in his eyes, the same look he got when he was perched up high, rifle cradled in his arms. 

Hell, even the rest of the Commandos; when Cap (he was still Captain America back then, not ‘Cap’) had come for them in Azzano, and Dum Dum (still Dugan back then, still unsure what kind of man he was in a cell with) had sneered at him “What, are we takin’ everybody?”. 

Jim was ready for a fight, always had been when guys got that tone in their voice, that look in their eyes, ready to enact some of Uncle Sam’s good old justice for Pearl Harbour. But instead he stared him down, flipped his tags out of his shirt and held them up. 

“I’m from Fresno, ace.”

And to his shock and wonder and joy, Dugan just nodded, and they strode out of the base side by side. 

Dernier had cared even less, just looking for someone to help Jim wrestle the first guard they saw to the ground and rip the glowing gun from his hands. 

Gabe had just nodded to him, slow and solemn over the table in the bar when they were back in England, and Monty hadn’t even said a thing, just muttered something about Shakespeare one night when they were having a quiet smoke on watch, and he figured if the stuck-up Brit could deal with fighting with a Jap, anyone could. 

After the raid on Reinhart’s base in ’46, he finally heads home to California, the only home he’s ever known, and finds his dad’s store boarded up and empty, sold on while they were hidden away in Manzanar, now tossed to the wind yet again, to the harsh dry deserts. His parents were just weary, used to the constant relocation and shifting by now, but his little brothers had become men far sooner than he’d ever wanted them to. 

He took everything of his army pension and his family’s savings and managed to get them all to San Francisco, to a city that felt even a little bit familiar to them, and cause damnit, he wants to be near the sea again. It’s not the life they’d had before, not even half the life his family deserves, but it’s enough and it’s more than most have in the wake of this bloody war. He takes what he knows of his wartime knowledge, of fixing radios and trucks with nothing but string and spite, and opens a garage. 

He trades letters with the Commandos for years, as Falsworth does his best to work his way into an early grave, and Dum Dum criss-crosses the country still fighting the good fight. When Dernier rolls onto the West coast full time, they get stinking drunk together, and the papers gleefully run stories of _“TWO COMMANDOS, REUNITED”_ for weeks; he becomes a minor local celebrity and gets a decent uptick in business after that. 

He swaps dark jokes with Gabe for years, while he works away covered in oil and grease and Gabe works his way through politics and diplomacy and subtlety. Occasionally one of them wonders, ‘What would Cap think of this?’ Or ‘How would Barnes feel about that?’, and Jim remembers Manzanar and he nearly breaks the engine he’s carefully working on. 

A few other _nisei_ families settle nearby, after the media frenzy about him and Dernier, and one of them who’d also fought comes by one night. Will, he was called, had been with the 442nd, and he told Jim over deep glasses of whiskey about the camp that they’d found one day, full of people that looked more skeletal than human, that cowered away from them like they were death themselves. 

Both their families had been in Manzanar so Jim knows what’s on his mind, and he silently grabs a toolkit and gestures for Will to follow him. There’s a beat up old Jeep in the back, one that was there when they bought the place, and they work on it quietly together until the sun starts to rise and Will starts crying silently as he works. Jim pulls him into a rough hug and sends him home to get some sleep, then sits down at the kitchen table and writes a reply to Gabe he’s been meaning to write for weeks now. 

Cause it’s been years since he last saw Cap and Barnes, remembers hearing Cap on the radio for that final, fatal call, and he genuinely can’t decide what they’d think of this. Of their own country, stooping as low as the men they’d hunted across Europe. 

Gabe writes back startlingly quick for a man angling for a career in politics, when he should be far too busy for people like Jim, and tells him about a conversation with his pops one late night in Georgia when he’d returned from the war. He sends him a small parcel too, with a crisp new copy of the book he mentioned inside, _A Room of One’s Own_. He reads it over breaks at the garage and on the beach at the weekends and loves it, and copies the quote Gabe mentioned down onto a sheet of paper and sticks it into his wallet. 

He doesn’t want to harm their memory, memorialise Cap and Sarge the way Dum Dum’s bar did (not that he’s complaining, the Commandos drink free there until the day they die and he’ll never argue that point), but he’ll remember them in his own way. As Steve and Bucky, first and last. 

Will starts coming round the shop more often with a bottle, and the conversations start to take a turn from the maudlin to the melancholy, and Jim begins to stop expecting another bomb to drop or another hail of bullets to start flying, and learns to ignore his mother chiding him about finding a wife. 

It’s a sweltering June day when he’s up to his elbows in a stubborn old engine block and the person who dropped it off had left a message saying they needed it done by 1 o’clock _sharp_ , according to Harry, who’d opened that morning to find them waiting outside impatiently. Jim had sent the other guys off to grab lunch, with strict instructions to bring him back something, while he got it finished up. 

The clock’s barely struck one when the door chimes open and Jim turns, ready to give the guys a chiding for taking so long, when the most gorgeous goddamn woman he’s ever laid eyes on is standing opposite, her eyebrow cocked and mouth set in a unimpressed slant and she doesn’t _care if you were best pals with Captain America I’m gonna be late so can you fix it or not?_

Jim falls a little in love during her five minute rant as he finishes up on the engine. 

Cause Leia, as he later finds out her name is, when Harry and the boys come back with Jim’s lunch and find him staring helplessly into space, speaks a million miles a minute and reminds him a little too much of Agent Carter. And for all he doesn’t mind the newfound fame from being a Howling Commando, and how everyone nowadays calls him ‘Private’ or ‘Mr Morita, sir’, which his dad still finds hilarious when people who wouldn’t give them the time of day before are now tripping over themselves to give up seats on trains and buses for them, he still misses the way he’d be able to talk with the rest of the Commandos, tossing barbs and jibes back and forth round the campfire or across the bar. 

But speaking with Leia feels just like that again, and god he’s missed it. 

He runs into her quite by accident in the butcher’s two blocks down a week later when she’s arguing with the guy behind the counter about the cut of the steak (she never seems to stop arguing, and later Jim’s hit with a bittersweet feeling when he realises she’ll never meet Steve, who could never seem to keep his mouth shut either), and Jim just catches her as she storms out and manages to ask her if she wants to get a drink. 

She sweeps him with a commanding eye and purses her lips and breathes out a short, sharp _huh_. “Fine. You can pick me up at eight.” And with that, she’s off down the street, her shoes clicking against the sidewalk like a chorus of bullets. 

Over drinks that evening, he gets her story and gives her his in return. She tells him about her parents coming over here from Tokyo in the 20s, and she was born shortly after, and now she works in publishing and is writing her own book, and still lives with her parents above the bookshop they own downtown, despite her mother still needling her to get married. Jim laughs and confesses his own mother’s not-so-subtle hints, and then, almost without meaning to, stories about the Commandos just fall out of him and he speaks for so long, and there’s something that flickers deep in her eyes as she listens to him ramble, until his voice catches in the middle of the story about Barnes and the owl’s nest, and he realises he’s embarrassingly close to tears. And he’s about to push his chair out, mumble out an excuse and walk home quickly, when her hand lands on his, her fingertips cool and soft against his callused and scarred hands. 

They walk down the beachfront together sharing a smoke, and in return she tells him about her brother, the one who didn’t make it back from Italy, and the letter from him she still keeps tucked between the pages of his favourite book. He kisses her for the first time on the beachfront, the waves crashing loud in his ears, the smell of salt in the air, and her hands on his cheeks. 

They get married three years later, and the Commandos all make it over for the ceremony, raucous and wild all the while, Falsworth flirting outrageously with anyone who crosses his path and Dum Dum drinking enough for three men, and Leia just laughs and kisses Jim softly and whispers in his ear.

His children are born the next year, and when Leia, curled in the hospital bed with their kids, one boy and one girl, in her arms, looks over at him and says so gently how she likes the name Stephanie for their daughter, he falls even more in love with her, something he never knew could happen. Their son takes a little while more, until she suggests James. James the second, after his _father,_ she argues for years, but she smiles softly when Rebecca Barnes meets James Morita the second, and she doesn’t say anything when Rebecca’s eyes grow damp as she holds him. 

They learn to tune out Monty whining about how _he’s_ technically called James as well as the years go by. 

Jim and Leia are both well past sixty when James Junior has a son of his own, and he proudly names him James Morita the third, and Jim holds his wife close as they watch their son cradling his own child. James the third proves to be a whiz at history, and when he graduates Howard ( _“hell of a curriculum Jim, that’s all I’m saying”_ Gabe crows at the party afterward), Jim takes all the old medals he’s been keeping in a tin on the dresser for years, frames them, and hands them over to his grandson. He’s moving to New York for a Master’s degree, and a friend of a friend has added there’s a school he knows that’s looking for a new history teacher, and they all wave him off at the airport, with minimal complaints about a Morita being on the _east_ coast. James Junior drives them home, bravely pretending that he’s _not_ crying, and Leia and Jim sit in the back and Leia quietly takes his hand. 

“We did good, didn’t we Jim?” His wife, his beautiful, wonderful wife whispers in his ear. And Jim thinks about his grandson, bearing the name him and Barnes shared, now in Steve and Bucky’s hometown ready to make his own way in the world.

“We really did.” He whispers back, and kisses her like there’s nothing else to worry about in the world.

-

He stays in the army. For an Irish orphan from Boston who ran away from the orphanage to join the circus, then ran away from the circus to join the army, his marriage in tatters and his son not wanting a damn thing to do with him, he doesn’t exactly have anyone to come home to, and his skills aside from the army involving drinking, eating, or finding one or both of the former in places no one else can. 

So Dum Dum sticks around, despite himself. He watches the rest of the Commandos go home and pick up their lives, and he jams his bowler back on his head and loads his rifle, cause there’s still a few HYDRA bastards sticking it out and if Cap and Sarge aren’t there to kill them, then a bullet from Dum Dum is the next best thing. 

He goes with Jim and the newer bunch of the Commandos to Reinhart’s base, and helps clear out that branch of HYDRA, and it really does seem like they’ve won, ripped those bastards roots and stem from the earth. They all make it back to the safehouse, and most of the group drops immediately, exhausted from the fighting and the marching and the cold, and everything really. 

But the room is just too damn cold and the wind howling outside the window reminds Dum Dum just too much of that mountain range, that narrow pass with Zola’s train running through it, and how broken Cap had looked when Gabe managed to drag him back to the Commandos after Barnes fell and he just can’t stop _thinking_ about it and-. 

Agent Carter finds him up on the roof, smoking a cigar. She shivers slightly in the frigid wind, and pulls her jacket slightly closer around her. Dum Dum hears her step carefully towards him, as he leans against the edge of the building and takes a drag, the tip of his cigar glowing cherry red in the night. He wordlessly offers her his box of matches and she accepts it without a word, lighting a cigarette of her own before passing them back. He takes another drag and grinds his teeth. 

God, he hated silences. Wartime was never quiet, which worked just fine for a kid who’d learnt to sleep with the screaming of the big top across from his tent. Quiet just felt unnerving, lifeless. When they thought they’d finally pushed back the krauts in Italy, it all went quiet. Then the tanks came, and then Azzano came too. 

Carter’s smoke is nearly burnt down to her fingertips when she speaks at last. 

“Cold.” She says simply, tossing the word out into the wind. 

“Mm.” Dum Dum grunts an affirmative behind his cigar, tapping off a length of ash. 

“Likely it’ll get colder.” She adds, taking a final drag and flicking her cigarette off the roof.

“What’s that s’posed to mean?” He growls, tired of the half truths and subtleties Carter likes to cloak her words in. He finally drags his eyes away from the horizon to Peggy, standing in the frigid Russian wind looking coolly back at him, her arms crossed tightly across her chest. 

“We might not be at war but there’s still a fight, Dugan, you know that.” And he doesn’t want to admit it, but damnit she’s right. 

“And?” He asks, quieter now, unsure of what she’s going to say, and even more unsure if he wants to hear it.

“And _nothing_ , Dugan.” she snaps, but there’s no real malice behind it. And as much as he misses them, he belatedly realises how much Peggy must miss Cap and Sarge too 

_Fuckin’ finally, numbskull_ , shouts a Brooklyn drawl from deep in his mind, and Dum Dum shakes his head and takes another drag on his cigar to chase away the ghosts.

“You want to get out, you’re more than welcome to.” She adds, turning to go, then pausing, and reaching a hand out to rest on his shoulder, just for a second. “But if you want to stay, give me a call.” She adds, firmly patting his shoulder and leaving him up on the roof with the wind and the ghosts. 

He heads back to Boston to pick up what little he had left at his ex-wife’s place, and she watches him with a steely eye as he crams a suitcase full of his old things. His son doesn’t say a word to him.

He wanders around the city for a while, the army pension burning a hole in his pocket that he can’t seem to fill with booze or smokes, before he thinks _to hell with it_ and buys a bar, one that’s stood empty since the old owner didn’t return home either, and the guy’s sister is grateful for someone to take the place that’s stained with memories off her hands. 

He plasters it floor to ceiling in pictures and memorabilia of the Commandos, in memory of the two kids from Brooklyn who didn’t get to come home. 

It becomes a minor tourist attraction when a few of the remnants of the 107th find out about it and come by for a few drinks, but everyone’s oddly polite about the whole thing. There’s a few regulars that still wear their tags under their shirts, and he sees them drink and commiserate and maybe privately cry a little on the weekends when they come by, but it also becomes a haunt for guys after a shift on the docks, or the truck drivers that ship in some of that fancy stuff Stark sends him every month. 

And for a few years, he learns to love the work, and pushes any thought of the war and Carter’s words out of his mind. Then, the papers start screaming about something going down in Korea, of all places, and the Russians are getting a little too interested in the South of it. 

And Dum Dum sighs, and hands the running of the bar over to Benjy, one of the Marines who hangs round the bar on weekends and lost a leg at Iwo Jima, and he heads to the phone in his office he uses very rarely. 

“Carter.” The voice answers crisply. 

“Hey there, Miss Union Jack,” he chuckles down the line. “Heard there’s a fight goin’ on.”

He deploys to Seoul with some of Carter’s spooks, with strict instructions to keep them from not dying, and as much as he hates to admit it, he’s missed the war. Missed fighting. The spooks make it back to America with whatever it was they were looking for, and then they send out another team, and another, and another, until pretty soon he’s running a little operation of his own in Korea, sending teams out to search and destroy, like a set of mini Commandos. Carter joins him one day, and they take a wander round the base they’re on to ‘talk’, as she ominously puts it. 

“There’re good people, Peg, don’t get me wrong,” he points out, scuffing a rock with his boot. “But half these kids couldn’t find their ass with both hands and a map. I get you’re short-staffed but they’re gonna need better training if you wanna keep doing this.” Carter stops at that, and turns to look at him through sharp, shrewd eyes.

“Funny you say that, Dugan.” She says slowly, and Dugan listens. 

The war wraps up and Dugan heads back to Boston for long enough to sort out all the proper paperwork with Benjy from interim manager to full-time manager, but Benjy flat-refuses to take the place off his hands entirely, and maintains it’s Dugan’s bar, after all. He shrugs and shakes his head and reminds them about the sign with the photos of the Commandos above the bar that declares in bold black letters, **“NEVER LET THEM PAY FOR A** **SINGLE** **DRINK”** , before he catches a train down to DC where Carter’s fledgling spy agency is taking off, bankrolled by Stark and run by Carter. 

They spend a few months criss-crossing the country to get funding, approval, and interest, and Gabe advises them on the name, which they both agree is _much_ better. Dugan vets a few of the old boys who hung round the bar, the ones who couldn’t find a place to move onto after the war ended, and they help him devise a positively _devious_ training regimen for these new kids joining S.H.I.E.L.D. The first set of applicants, all tough and ready, according to their commanders, arrives at the gates of the off-the-books S.H.I.E.L.D training ground one crisp spring morning, four hundred of them from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. 

Over a hundred are cut by the end of the first day. 

Another fifty by the end of the week.

Another hundred over the next two weeks. 

By the end of the month, he’s got less than a hundred battered, bruised, and weary as hell soldiers, and he proudly presents them to Carter with a cursory “They’ll do.”

And Carter grins that feral grin and Dum Dum grins back. The first set of S.H.I.E.L.D operatives are minted and made ready, and Peggy approaches him when they’re all out drinking that evening, Dum Dum watching the young soldiers laugh and joke together with a jumble of memories behind his eyes.

“This seat taken?” She asks, sliding into the booth beside him without waiting for an answer and sipping her brandy. “You did good, Timothy.” She adds, her eyes careful. 

“Happy to help out.” He replies, plastering a grin on his face. He’d got a letter the other day, a scrap of newspaper from his ex-wife, declaring the marriage of Sean Dugan to a Maria Adams. She always knew how to cut him to the bone. 

He chases away the memories with a large swallow of beer and looks back at Carter. She’s watching him with something indistinguishable in her eyes. 

“How would you feel,” she asks slowly “about staying on with S.H.I.E.L.D?”

“You still need a drinking buddy?”

“I need a soldier.” She reproaches with a grin, her eyes glinting. “Howard’s still going to provide us with whatever toys we need, and intelligence is more my game of cricket than operations. As much as I’d like to I can’t keep the ship steady on my own. Truman’s not too keen on a lady running this new agency, but I don’t trust any of the idiots he sends my way either. I need someone I can trust.” She finishes, eyeballing him over the rim of her glass. 

Dugan sits for a moment, absorbing her words. He reaches for his glass, then lets his hand fall. He thinks of the rest of the Commandos. Monty surrounded by his books, Dernier loving every moment of his new career, Gabe rising to fight the good fight, and Jim and his two kids. He’s got a photo of them that Jim sent over last week tucked into his wallet. And the scrawl of their handwriting at the base of his letters, to ‘Uncle Dum Dum’. 

His hand finds its way back to his pint glass, and he takes a heavy draught, finishing it off, and reaching for the pitcher of beer on the table in front of him, refilling it. And he remembers Cap putting round after round down in front of the Commandos, drinking and laughing while Barnes tells some dirty joke or tall tale from Brooklyn. A sob punches its way up his chest, and he valiantly attempts to turn it into a derisive snort. Peggy’s eyes tell him she knows better, but she purses her lips and says nothing. 

“I’m in.” He says finally, raising his glass to his lips. “But you gotta do one thing for me.”

“And what’s that?” Peggy asks, her lips twisted in that half smile of hers, already knowing his answer. He sets his glass down heavily on the table and belches.

“Open a tab.” He grins back at her, and she smiles and raises her glass to meet his.

-

_“The stories of the Howling Commandos are legendary, their stories of their operations in World War Two rivalling that of the American 101st Airborne Division, French Resistance, or the British Long-Range Desert Group. The deaths of two of their members, super soldier Captain Steven Rogers (1918-1945), and Master Sergeant James ‘Bucky’ Barnes, (1917-1944) remain embedded deep within our conscious as a nation; the sacrifice of two boyhood friends for their country. But the world’s first and last supersoldier, and the unintentional father of the U.S Army’s Sniper School are but part of the stories of the Commandos; the stories of James Montgomery Falsworth, Professor Emeritus at Cambridge University, famed pyrotechnic technician and Hollywood producer Jacques Dernier, US Ambassador to France and first African-American Senator for Georgia, Gabriel Jones, civil rights and anti-war activist James Morita, and the first Operations Director of S.H.I.E.L.D_ , _Timothy Dugan, may be less well known, but all of whom still influenced the makeup of the world’s foremost special operations unit in their own manner.”_

_-Howling Heroes: A Biography of The World’s First Special Forces Team_ , by Jack Simon, (Marvel Press).

_“I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked me the other day when he said, ‘Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?’ Grandpa said ‘No…but I served in a company of heroes.’”_

_-Sergeant Mike Ranney_

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the wartime song by Vera Lynn, ‘We’ll meet again’. 
> 
> Bucky’s skills as a sniper, particularly one in such an elite unit, would have been legendary, and I believe that one way or another, his influence would have been prevalent in sniper training for years after the war.
> 
> Bonus points for anyone who figures out the origin of the name of the author of ‘Howling Heroes’.
> 
> In this story, Gabe Jones’ father is part of the 369th Infantry Regiment, or the Harlem Hellfighters, one of the first African American regiments, which was formed in World War 1, and who are famous for never losing a foot of ground, despite spending the longest amount of time of any American unit in frontline trenches during the war (191 days). 
> 
> The ‘victory abroad, victory at home’ slogan refers to the Double V Campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_V_campaign . 
> 
> The line “That’s a shield too, Buck.” Is a reference to literally the greatest fanwork ever, ‘The Night War’. Read it. 
> 
> Manzanar was one of the American concentration camps established during WW2, and imprisoned over 120,000 Japanese Americans between 1942 and 1945.
> 
> The 442nd Infantry Regiment was a World War 2 regiment formed almost exclusively of Japanese-Americans, and is the most decorated unit in U.S military history, earning over 18,000 awards in under two years, including eight Presidential unit citations, and twenty-one Medals of Honour.


End file.
